Health Inc Seminar Series is co-hosted by the Lawrence Bloomberg Faculty of Nursing, the DLSPH’s Centre for Global Health, and the WHO Collaborating Centre for Governance, Accountability and Transparency in the Pharmaceutical Sector. 

The race is on to develop a vaccine to help quell the outbreak of Ebola virus disease currently ripping its way through the Democratic Republic of Congo and Uganda. With millions in funding from the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI), the United States government, and other sources, four vaccine candidates are in the lead, with an mRNA vaccine among the frontrunners. However, the race to develop a Bundibugyo vaccine is less about competing technological platforms, and more about the commercial forces that control them all. In this seminar, Professor Matthew Herder will discuss how vaccine research and development, despite government and philanthropic investments, often fails to address public health need and inequities. Rather, due to opaque arrangements and lack of public accountability, commercial interests frequently infiltrate R&D process and extract a profit from an intervention even when it has little lucrative potential, as in the case of an Ebola outbreak. Instead, mechanisms such as technology transfer and provision of resources to local organizations must be developed to make vaccines and other essential medicines in places where infectious diseases like Ebola are endemic beyond the current outbreak.

Recommended readings:

Herder M, Graham JE, Gold ER (2020). From discovery to delivery: public sector development of the rVSV-ZEBOV Ebola vaccine. Journal of Law & Biosciences, 7(1):lsz019. doi: 10.1093/jlb/lsz019

Sariahmed, K., Graham, J.E., Herder, M., & Morten, C.J. (2025). Public sector innovation and the constraints of ‘platform thinking’: An account of Johnson & Johnson’s adenoviral vector vaccines. Social Science & Medicine, 387: 118687 doi: 10.1016/j.socscimed.2025.118687

Herder M, Benavides X (2024) ‘Our project, your problem?’ A case study of the WHO’s mRNA technology transfer programme in South Africa. PLOS Glob Public Health 4(9): e0003173. doi: 10.1371/journal.pgph.0003173